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Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Cybersecurity Subcommittee, is no different from other members of Trump's base. They admire him for his ability to stare into people's eyes and tell them "big whoppers." There is no such thing as an inconvenient truth for a Trumpkin, because they prefer falsehoods over facts.

When it comes to what Trump was thinking, however, the right, like everyone, was largely at a loss for words. Until Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) plunged into that abyss of logic and offered up the most incoherent, but revealing explanation for Trump’s conduct during the press conference Monday. Sen. Rounds, who is the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Cybersecurity Subcommittee, offered up this explanation to Erica Werner of the Washington Post for why Trump refused to acknowledge Russian election interference of any kind:

"Everything I’ve seen and all the facts are very clear: Russia did meddle in our election. That was very clear. So I think what actually happened, I think Mr. Putin just got out-Trumped by Trump. If Mr. Putin thinks he can tell a whopper, he’s not gonna be outdone by this president. And so if Mr. Putin is going to look at him and try to straight-faced tell him that they didn’t meddle, our president can look right back at him and tell just as big a whopper back to Putin as Putin told him."

This video was far more interesting than I thought it was going to be. It's not only the story of the restoration of a cool barn find, a circa 1890 candy-making machine, but it details how Greg Cohen of Lofty Pursuits in Tallahassee, Florida used it to make strawberry "drops" (hard candies). Cohen is a real candy-making nerd and he shares how he spent 70 to 80 hours restoring this antique machine for the Klondike Gold Rush National Historic Museum in Skagway, Alaska:

To this day there aren’t many good roads into it, if any. Imagine how hard it would have been to get this device up there to be used for candy? And how much money there must have been in the 1890s... to warrant someone bringing it up so that miners could have a little bit of happiness in their pocket, some nice candies to eat, I guess, when they mine? It was a good bit of luxury that they could take with them, that they didn’t have to worry about spoiling. Because they lived a really rough life as they mined up there.

And while it probably was worth bringing to Skagway for business reasons, it probably wasn’t worth bringing it back, so it got stashed in a barn and it’s been sitting there for the last hundred and something years, slowly rusting away forgotten.

And now I’ve been given an opportunity to give it a little bit of new life making candy again.

The odds of seeing Nathan Fillion rock the role of Green Lantern in a live action movie are pretty slim at this point. The same goes for him gracing the silver screen as Uncharted's Nathan Drake. But the high quality of this fan flick ALMOST makes up for that. Behold: Nathan Fillion as Naughty Dog's Nathan Drake. For a fan film, the product quality (and the amount of money that would have to have been spent to pull it all together) is pretty damn high.

Give it a watch: there are far worse ways to waste 15 minutes of your day. Additionally, if you're so inclined, Kotaku has a great story on how the film came to be. Read the rest

Here's my reading (MP3) of Zuck's Empire of Oily Rags, a Locus Magazine column about the corruption implicit in surveillance capitalism, which creates giant risks to users by collecting sensitive information about them in order to eke out tiny gains in the efficacy of targeted advertising. The commercial surveillance industry may not be very good at selling us fridges, but they're very good at locating racists and thugs and getting them to support violent political movements.

The little pink-edged ferns above are Azolla filiculoides, and they're smaller than a fingernail. Scientists just made it the first fern to get its genome sequenced because of its potential for fertilizing and even cooling the planet. Fifty million years ago, it was so abundant as ocean blooms that it helped cool the earth's atmosphere. Via Quartz:

This great Azolla boom was so successful that it lasted for 800,000 years, and is now known to paleobotanists as the “Azolla event.” Green plants suck up carbon dioxide; Azolla is particularly good at doing so. Over that period, researchers believe it sequestered about 10 trillion tons of carbon dioxide from the Earth’s atmosphere, or well over 200 times the total amount of carbon dioxide humans currently release into the atmosphere every year.

During the Azolla boom, global temperatures plummeted, suggesting the diminutive fern “played a key role in transitioning Earth from a hot house to the cool place it is today,” Fay-Wei Li, a plant evolutionary biologist at Cornell University, said in a press release. As Yale’s E360 pointed out, scientists have wondered for years if Azolla could be harnessed to cool the planet again.

Axel Voss is the German MEP responsible for Article 13 of the pending EU Copyright Directive, which says that it's not good enough for companies to remove infringing material posted by users once they're notified of its existence; instead, Voss wants then to spend hundreds of millions of dollars implementing automated filters that prevent anyone from posting copyrighted material in the first place (even if they have the right to do so under fair dealing, and even if that means that a lot of legitimate material gets accidentally blocked).
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Zach Smith writes, "Lorenzo Music's Carlton the Doorman was one of TV's great unseen characters...but he finally got a face in this special, intended as a series pilot. And he...kind of looked like a hippie. The intended series would have been one of the first adult-oriented prime-time cartoons, but while it didn't make it past the pilot, it did win an Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program...and Lorenzo Music would have better luck in animation a few years later when he started voicing Garfield the Cat. The special, which was never rebroadcast after its initial airing, is also available on the RHODA: SEASON FIVE DVD set from SHOUT! Factory, and the YouTube channel this is on has a treasure trove of unaired series, alternate first episodes, concept presentations and more."
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Democratic Socialist heroine Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (previously) is heading to Congress this fall, and though she's promised not to blow up the Democratic party when she gets there, she's not going to let the pro-finance establishment roll over her.
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As far back as 2012, UCLA researchers were publishing studies that showed that Americans basically never used their "formal spaces" -- dining rooms, "great rooms" and parlours -- instead, they spend most of their time in the kitchen and the "informal" den.
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The UK will give you a visa if you "invest" USD2.65M in the country; historically these "millionaire visas" were used by Eastern European oligarchs and other looters whose "investments" were in shell companies or high-end, empty luxury flats, or similar socially useless ways of laundering their fortunes.
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